Are you looking for ways to increase learning in the classroom? Teachers help their students learn, and it takes a lot of time. I spent hours searching for activities and resources to help my students understand new topics and develop new skills. Many of us don’t have that time to spend. We have kids, families, friends, and other responsibilities that suffer when we focus solely on our students.
How to Increase Learning in the Classroom
Luckily, you don’t have to choose between your students and your sanity. I have nine easy things you can do to increase learning in the classroom, no matter what resources you are using to teach. These suggestions are geared toward upper elementary, middle school, and high school classrooms, but you could tweak them for use in a younger classroom.
1. Activate Their Curiosity
First, you need to activate your students’ curiosity. Curiosity is a powerful tool that will motivate your students to learn more. Showing interesting videos or doing a demonstration will definitely activate your students’ curiosity, but you can do it even more simply than that.
Think about what makes you curious about a topic. If it doesn’t make you curious, why would it make your students? Think about the questions you have (or had) about the topic and present them to your students. Questions naturally stimulate curiosity. Our brains love a mystery, and a good question is a mystery that needs to be solved. For example, to introduce a unit on the solar system, you could ask your students about life on other planets. You could also ask how long they think it will be before humans land on Mars. You could also ask if anyone can name all of the planets or how Jupiter is different from Mercury. The specific question isn’t as important as the fact that you are asking it. You can also have students ask their own questions. Collect the questions in one place to get everyone excited about the unit.
2. Use Their Background Knowledge
Once you have piqued students’ curiosity, you can build a bridge between what they already know and what they will learn. What we already know is called background knowledge, and we all have it. Each of us has a different collection of background knowledge based on our prior experiences. Your students have different background knowledge from you and each other. Our varied background knowledge is a powerful tool you can use for learning in the classroom. Everyone can learn from each other!
Unfortunately, many students don’t think about what they already know when they are at school. You can help them make connections between new information and their existing neural networks. Asking questions will get this process started, but you want to make it even more explicit than that.
You can do a simple activity in which students write down everything they think they know about a topic. Sticking with the solar system, they can write names of planets, the fact that the sun is hot, and the planets revolve around the sun. Some of the information students write may be wrong, but that is okay. Finding the appropriate neural networks will make it easier for them to learn the right information.
3. Explore Their Connections
Depending on the topic, you may have students who insist they don’t know anything about it. This is not true. There is always a connection to be made. Even students who do know something about a new topic will benefit from thinking about connections to other things they know.
Thinking about the connections between different topics makes our students more creative learners and builds their neural networks. Making connections is how we solve problems, so we want our students to be really good at this skill.
You can use the concept of making connections to help your students learn new information, but you can also use it to create something new. For example, if you are studying the human body in class, you can ask your students to compare the human body to something completely different. Maybe they will compare the human body to a city or a factory. Thinking about two seemingly unrelated things will help your students make a new model that they can use to understand the world.
4. Build Their Vocabularies
If you can’t tell, I was a science teacher. Teaching vocabulary is important in all content areas, but it is essential in science. In so many cases, vocabulary is the content of a science lesson. How can a student understand mitosis without knowing the definition of it and a dozen other words?
Oftentimes, students will not admit to not knowing what a word means because they don’t want people to think they are stupid. You can cultivate a community of active learners by focusing on the goal of building vocabulary.
You can start by creating word walls for units that introduce new vocabulary words. Before reading any text, give students a few minutes to look for words they don’t know. If a student asks the definition of the word, praise him or her for being a proactive learner and give the definition. We want our students to share when they don’t know a word to build their vocabularies and improve learning in the classroom!
5. Tell Them What is Important
One of the biggest differences between a novice and an expert is that experts know what information is important. Think about the first time you drove a car. You were on sensory overload! I think I went about five miles per hour the first time I got behind the wheel. I was terrified I was going to miss something and make a mistake! Of course, nearly twenty-five years later, everything has changed. Sometimes, I have to remind myself to pay attention to the road.
Students learning in the classroom are novices in your subject. They don’t know what is important and what isn’t, so they will either write down everything or get overwhelmed and write down nothing. As their teacher, you can help them pay attention to the important stuff by pointing it out to them.
The easy way to do this is to tell them what is important at the beginning of a lecture or reading assignment. You can do this by asking them questions about it. For example, if you want your students to know the five functions of the respiratory system (that was a random number – I don’t think there are exactly five functions of the respiratory system), then you can say they will need to tell you the five functions of the respiratory system when they are done reading.
Scaffolded Notes
A harder but even more effective way to help students focus on the important information is to provide them with scaffolded notes. These are notes that you create that have blanks for some information. For example, you could have a section labeled Functions of the Respiratory System with numbers below it to give students room to record the respiratory system’s five functions.
Of course, this blog post is all about increasing learning in the classroom and saving time, and creating scaffolded notes does take time. You could set a goal to create one set per quarter until you have covered all of the units you teach.
6. Help Them Remember
Learning in the classroom is a two-step process. First, students have to understand new information. Then, they have to remember new information.
The only way to remember something is to remember it. That sounds a little satirical, but here is how it works. Every time you have a thought, a set of neurons fires. We call this a neural network. Related neurons fire together, and every time their fire together, the connection between them gets stronger, and the information gets easier to recall. For example, you can now write your name without even thinking about it. You probably don’t remember the hard work you put into practicing writing your name in preschool and kindergarten.
While it doesn’t make sense to have our students practice to the point of automaticity with all of the information in a unit, you do want to give them plenty of opportunities to remember what they are learning.
Comprehension Questions
My favorite way to help students remember are comprehension questions. Usually, students work on comprehension questions as they read. They find the information and answer the question. However, comprehension questions can be used as a powerful remembering tool if you don’t give students the questions until they have already read. Now, students are forced to try to remember the answers. Of course, if students can’t remember, they can still go back and look for the answers. Even just trying to remember will strengthen their neural networks.
Flashcards
Another powerful tool to affect learning in the classroom and to make students practice remembering is flashcards. Flashcards can be used with any subject, and they are probably the most perfect study tool for content. Students look at the question or word on a flashcard, and their brains automatically search for the answer. When the student turns the flashcard over, he or she is given the correct information immediately. This powerful cycle builds stronger neural networks every time students work with flashcards. Plus, students only have to work with the flashcards for a few minutes a day to see results, so they are more likely to study with them.
7. Help Them Feel Safe
As teachers, we are often so focused on the thinking and learning part of the brain that we forget that our students are mainly controlled by the lower parts of the brain. It’s not just our students. We all are.
If we want our students to learn, we have to ensure that they feel safe in our classroom. We have to show them, day after day, that we care about them and accept them for who they are. If our students don’t feel safe, their working memories will be occupied in the fight, flight, or freeze response of the amygdala. They can’t learn if their bodies are full of adrenaline.
The Importance of Choice to Increase Learning in the Classroom
One way to show students that you accept and care about them as individuals is to give them choices in learning. I talk a lot about one of the first science classes I taught. This was probably the most difficult class I ever had. I didn’t start until a month into the school year, and these poor kids had had substitute teachers with no science background until I got there.
I would have done many things differently to improve learning in the classroom had I known then what I know now. One of the biggest things I realized was that many of my students messed around when it was time to read. I can now see that they didn’t have the reading comprehension skills to understand what they were reading. Of course, they would never admit it because they were embarrassed.
What a difference it would have made to all of us if I had given everyone a choice about how to learn. Everyone could have had the same set of questions, but some could watch a video, some could work with me, and some could read to find the answers. Then, we could come back together as a class to share what we learned.
Next Steps to Increase Learning in the Classroom
If you have made it this far, then you want to increase learning in the classroom! I can help you get started with my reading passage sets. They follow these principles, so you have what you need to help your students learn.
Are You Teaching Another Science Topic?
I am working on creating more science units so that every science teacher can get exactly what he or she needs for her students. You can also read about how I use brain science to teach other science topics on my blog. Click the pictures below to learn more.
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